


love manifest

by softlyblue



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Episode: c02e128 Cat and Mouse, M/M, Multi, i have blumentrio feelings, the way people love caleb, the ways they put themselves in danger for him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29945670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/softlyblue
Summary: Caleb is a selfish man.
Relationships: Astrid/Eodwulf/Caleb Widogast, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 8
Kudos: 80





	love manifest

**Author's Note:**

> 128 really got to me, man. i'll talk abt caleb's feelings to the people he loves down below. i could have included jester and veth in this but i'll mention in the end notes why i didnt.

**_love manifest_ **

e s s e k t h e y l s s

At first, dunamancy is just another way the Dynasty is trying to sweeten the pot for them all. Caleb has seen this sort of manipulation before, has been won by this sort of manipulation before, and he tells himself he never will be again. He allows Essek to walk him through the steps, his dark fingers trailing light in the air, and when Caleb copies the motions and Essek smiles at him and says _well done, Caleb Widogast,_ all Caleb feels is vindication.

He is learning, despite it all. He will learn for himself. He will not let this gift win him over to one side or the other. He is sick of being a pawn.

And now Essek is looking at him sick and horrified, and those slim, magical fingers are gripping the back of a chair and they are in Eiselcross and it is far too cold for any gifted warmth to reach them. He is here because of them. He is this low because of them - because of his own greed, yes, but did they stop him? Did he want them to stop him?

He looks at Caleb.

When Essek talks about dunamis, Caleb feels almost like his old self. "It is like climbing a mountain," he says softly, so only Essek and maybe Beauregard can hear him, "But the peak, it keeps getting further away, no matter how high you climb."

For the first time, Essek looks at him. His eyes are full of mourning. The edges of them are wet, although Caleb will not mention it, and Essek's knuckles are lilac where he's gripping the chair. "If I did not know you better I would think you spoke from experience," he says, aiming for a joke and landing somewhere south of it. He swallows. "You are right. Climbing the mountain that never ends."

"But you look down," Caleb continues, and doesn't let Essek's eyes fall from him, "And you are higher than you ever thought you'd get."

Essek laughs.

When they're leaving, Essek pulls Caleb back, and they sit ensconced in Essek's cold, impersonal chambers. Caleb feels the reach of him, sad, longing, and he wants to give Essek what he doesn't have. He wants Essek to know what Caleb never did. He holds his hand, and their fingers curl together, warm, slender lavender wrapping over Caleb's scarred digits. It's almost beautiful enough to make up for Caleb's failings. "I am under fire," Essek confesses, his head dipped so that Caleb can't look into his eyes, "And I fear that I will carry you all down with me, but I would not change a thing. Does that make me selfish?"

"Yes," Caleb says, because it does. He feels Essek's wince through his whole body. "But... I am selfish, too. We are all selfish. You... are up your mountain. You are climbing."

"I cannot reach the top," Essek confesses like a crime.

"No."

When Caleb performs dunamancy now, he feels as though Essek is casting through him. The components are so different to the magic he usually relies on, but he finds he enjoys it, the grey-black void in the air when he presses the pearl to his own forehead, the odd, not-ugly sound of foreign vowels in the back of his throat. Essek was not told to teach him magic. He knows that. _Now,_ he knows that. Essek did it just for the joy of knowing, for the joy of spreading knowledge to a kindred spirit, and they are no longer separated by talent and skill and lands.

Underneath the sanatorium, Caleb retreats to the spot in his mind where he knows he will be safe, and he wraps himself in his own arms and watches his actions. Who pilots his body? Not him. It's cold. He stalks down the corridor and he doesn't think twice before he kills them, and when he sees the door to the room where the rack lurks still and quiet as an unused weapon, he wants to scream. It's unfair. His father grew _turnips._ Why is he here, smelling blood in the air, watching the woman he loves lose her faith in him?

What spell should he use? What spell should he use?

Before, he would have fallen back on the fire he knows he can perform no matter what. He killed them with fire. He should always kill with fire, so that he knows he is irredeemable.

He reaches inside himself, his hand held out, an avenger of sorts without anything celestial around him. He must stink of death.

He pulls out dunamancy and he hardly thinks before he casts, but he feels Essek around him. Holding his wrist. Guiding his fingers. Whispering the incantation in his ear.

He doesn't even think about the danger, because Caleb is a selfish man.

e a d w u l f g r i e v e

He was the biggest. When Bren was small, when they were all small, one of the bigger girls from the village liked to throw potato skins at him when he was walking past her house, as she cut vegetables for her family. Bren just stuck with it because what else was he meant to do? He picked carrot peel from his hair, and threw it in the coop for the chickens, and it was hardly the worst thing in his life. He continued. He watched the fire hop from his thumb one day, and he buried that in the soil and kept pulling onions up by their hair.

"Doesn't it annoy you?" Eadwulf asks him. He was the biggest, always the biggest. When he hugged Bren he would pick him up, and swing him from side to side like a ragdoll, and Bren would allow himself to be swung. It made him feel warm.

"Yes," Bren shrugs, and continues. Today he is not working on the farm, and neither is he doing the million and one things his mother wants him to; today he and Eadwulf are sitting in one of the farthest fields, knotting grass into little man-shaped things to float down the river when they are dry.

Eadwulf doesn't say anything more about it, but she never does it again. She sticks her tongue out at Bren when she sees him passing alone, but when he is with his friends, and he is always with his friends, she is silent and ignores him.

Eadwulf kisses him on the third night of their first year in the Academy.

They go to the dance hall to celebrate being put in the same transmutation class, and Bren gets so drunk he can't see straight, and when a woman asks him to dance he says yes and before he can take her hand he finds Eadwulf there, a hand on his waist, an arm around him. "He is spoken for," Eadwulf says, in that rumbly low voice of his, and he spins him into the dance.

Bren is much smaller than Eadwulf is, even before he spends all those years trying to starve the life out of himself. They dance. Astrid he can see over Eadwulf's shoulder, playing cards with a group of students in their class and laughing, her long, supple leg bouncing to the beat of the song. "You're a good dancer," he tells Eadwulf, breathless, drunk.

"You taught me to dance," Eadwulf says. "Can I kiss you?"

Bren always loved that Eadwulf would tell him what he wanted. _Can I sit beside you? Can you show me how you did that? Will you let me help? Can I kiss you?_

"Of course," he replies, as though there was ever any doubt.

Eadwulf kisses him and it tastes of sugar and whiskey. He shaved before they came to the Academy, as though a half-grown beard would somehow impede his learning, and like this he looks a lot younger, a lot less serious. He swings Bren around, their hands clasped, leading the dance, and Bren doesn't even have to worry about falling, because he knows Eadwulf will catch him.

And now, in the present, Caduceus tells him what they said.

"I'm not doing it for you," he repeats, in his sonorous, comforting voice, "I'm doing it for him."

Caleb stares at his knees, at his shaking hands, and he tastes vomit in his throat and he wants so terribly to let the breaths he can't breathe express themselves, but there's no time for that.

He can't even thank him. Caleb is a selfish man.

a s t r i d b e c k

They have just _been._ Always.

They sleep together. Her sheets smell of her, of bergamot and sleep and of Eadwulf, and she likes to lie topless in the mornings with the smoke of her incense spiralling out through her open window, the sun cast through the glass, studying one of their endless textbooks, Bren, sometimes Eadwulf, sometimes both of them, lying in a similar state, reading or doing something else, quiet as only someone who had their first sexual experience in a dormitory can manage to be.

Bren's favourite memories are of weekend mornings, waking up to the sight of her long blonde hair spilling down her throat and across her breasts, fire cupped in her palm as she lights the candles around her room. "Good morning," she will say to him, and to Eadwulf, and they will sleep and eat and study together.

He will never forget the first time Trent tried to hurt him.

The spell is cast and he is held as firm as a rabbit terrified in the shining light of the hunter's torch. Trent holds his wrist like it might break if he squeezes, and he lifts Bren's arm until it is stretched out and stiff, and he tells Bren to hold it there, not to move for anything, no matter what happens. Bren is crying. The tears are fat and earnest and they roll down his face and drop, unnoticed, to the cold flagstones below.

"Master Ikithon," Astrid says, bursting into the room, not looking at Bren, as though she knew this would happen. Maybe she did. She was the sharpest of the three of them. "Master, I have found - I have discovered - I would like the honour. Please."

Ikithon laughs, like he knows what she's doing, but in those early days his leash was long and his indulgence was plentiful, as though they were a gaggle of misbehaving puppies. "So you would like to take his place? For the power?"

"Yes, master," Astrid nods, her green eyes hungry, and when Ikithon looks away her eyes bore into Bren's and all he sees is how much she loves him.

She does love him. He's never once thought she didn't.

He is allowed to go that evening, and he and Eadwulf shiver in Astrid's bed, Eadwulf holding a rag to Bren's eyes to prevent the tears from puffing up the skin below them, and she does not return to them until the following evening, her cheeks hollow, her arms lacerated, healing but scarring. Any fool could see the marks that Ikithon _meant_ to have left there. She refused to talk about it, even then, as though if they ignored it, it might go away.

Caleb looks at her.

Caleb _looks_ at her.

She must have run ahead, but the seconds are ticking down, and the tuning fork in his hand is burning his skin badly. It hurts. Everything hurts him, he finds, especially the things he wants to love.

She says the incantation. He _sees_ her saying the incantation. He sees her hand extended to cast it, and he sees the moment she means for him to know she's failing on purpose. He sees the moment she tells him she still loves him.

The risks she has taken for him, because she loves him.

And Caleb can say nothing and do nothing because he is saving his friends, and he wishes he could tell her he still loves her too and always will, but he cannot. The spell whisks him away and Caleb allows it because Caleb is a selfish man.

**Author's Note:**

> so! the reason i didnt include jester and veth (and the nein generally) as people who loved caleb and sacrificed things for him is because i specifically wanted to show how requited romance with caleb led to this insane loyalty for a&e, and also essek. like. the eiselcross moment where essek specifically wouldnt look at caleb proves to me that their romance is requited, even if neither of them will act on it. 
> 
> i find it really interesting, especially after 128, how caleb sees the actions of those who love him as something to feel guilty over. he almost has a panic attack over jester involving marion and of course he's always been almost more aware of veth's family than veth herself, but caleb just cannot take the actions of people who care about him as anything but failing on his part for not protecting them by making himself unlovable. when people risk themselves for him, he blames himself rather than them. the pain on his face when astrid purposefully failed her counterspell, and earlier when he realised why they were in the chateau, was so awful. it boils down to the responsibility he continually piles on his own shoulders, and has done all the way through the campaign, and how he thinks he is fundamentally unlovable so anyone who does must have been tricked by him, even if he wasn't aware of tricking them himself. 
> 
> we've seen it before, when jester & nott sent that letter to astrid he went frantic with worry for jester's family and took all responsibility onto his own shoulders even though he had no knowledge of the letter and would certainly have stopped them if he could. i definitely think caduceus or beau will talk to him about this in the near future because he is one gust of wind away from a real breakdown over the responsibility he is putting on his own shoulders. astrid and eadwulf endangered themselves because they CARE about him and so do the rest of the nein and he is incapable of translating that as anything other than a failing in his own self. 
> 
> anyway. i love caleb 
> 
> tumblr is softlyblues lmaoo


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